"Unwitting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... absurd charges with haughty disdain, he soon perceived that the danger was growing serious and that it was necessary for him to hasten his return to Rome, where a trial was now inevitable. One of Germanicus's friends had accused him; Agrippina, an unwitting tool in the hands of the emperor's enemies, every day stirred public opinion to still higher pitches of excitement through her grief and her laments; the party of Germanicus worked upon the senate and the people, and when Piso arrived at Rome he found that he had been ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... the tenderest ones and weakest, Who their wrongs have borne the meekest, Lifting from those dark, still places, Sweet and sad-remembered faces, O'er the guilty hearts behind An unwitting triumph find. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... slowed down and Pee-wee could feel that it was turning into another road. His unwitting captors were evidently either nervous or sleepy, for they talked ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... high Jove's majesty, bride unwitting, Cease from your sobbing; rise, your luck is rare. Your name's the name which half the world divided ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... me into society by degrees. I hardly knew where the line was passed, between quiet conversaziones and brilliant and courtly assemblies. It was passed when I was unwitting of it, or when I felt unable to help it. My mother had been so much alienated by my behaviour toward Marshall and De Saussure, that I thought it needful to please her by every means in my power, short of ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... is unique, for she is drawn with absolute sincerity and speaks nothing out of character. Certainly no parody can be made out of the nobly spoken lines 633-52, which lend a genuine air of tragedy to the professed tragi(co)comoedia (59, 63); unless we think of the lady's unwitting compromising condition (surely too subtle a thought for the original audience). Note also the exalted tone of 831-4, 839-42. But all through this scene Sosia is prancing around, prating nonsense, and playing ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... party set off at full speed, all unwitting that four disconsolate maidens were marooned on the farther side of the river, waiting for some faerie boat to ferry them across. For a long time no knight-errant arrived for their relief, but at last, as chance would ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... splendid physique and love of martial display seemed to invite him to complete the campaigns of Catherine II. against the Turks, and to wash out in the waves of the Danube the remorse which he still felt at his unwitting complicity in a parricidal plot. Between his love of liberty and of foreign conquest he for the present wavered, with a strange constitutional indecision that marred a noble character and that yielded him a prey more than once to a masterful will or to ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... courage, and he knew the words would die in his throat if he attempted to speak them, and so he must go away without knowing the way to the Father—but his feet dragged unwillingly along, and his eyes searched earnestly the figures that, unwitting of his want, passed swiftly ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... James Carter, King's Son; Glory! there's Mary Carter, King's Son. Hallelujah!" How far he would have pursued the list of family names we don't know, had not the whole meeting burst into laughter and tears at Abe's unwitting mistake in calling Mary Carter a King's Son; but it was of no consequence to him; a little slip of his happy tongue didn't mar his meaning; the people cheered him, and on he went as ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... to myself, in the way I have told you, the ease of my unwitting replenishment of force whenever I was brought low, I set myself to improve on my discovery. I saw before me a prospect of enjoyment of all the delights of life, deeper and more constant than most men ever ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... and putting on his hat, accompanied Barker, all unwitting of the thunder-blow that his words had been.... Mrs. Wallace was at home. James went upstairs, forgetting everything but that the woman he loved was free—free! His heart beat so that he could scarcely breathe; he was afraid ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... her part, was none the less ill at ease. She passed a restless night, and in the morning confided her case to her aged chamberlain, who was almost a second father to her, and he, all unwitting that Eliduc was already bound in wedlock to another, suggested that the Princess should send the knight a love-token to discover by the manner in which he received it whether or not her love was returned. Guillardun took this advice, and sent her lover a girdle and a ring by the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... me," saith he. "Can you do a deed in the dark, unwitting of the cause—knowing only that it is for the King's honour and true good, and that they which ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... have any business of even remotely legitimate nature within the precincts of the "Clarion" office. Tradition of the place held that a dent in the wall back of his desk marked the termination of an argument in which Reginald, all unwitting, had essayed to maintain his thesis against the lightweight champion of the State who had come to call on the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is the unwitting victim in a story of incest. Like Oedipus, she has lost her parent-lover by suicide; like him she leaves the scene of the revelation overwhelmed by a sense of her own guilt, "a sacred horror"; like him, she finds a measure of peace as she is ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... my kinsman in the direction of the hole. Reflection directed us to the conclusion that both pistols had missed their aim, and that Sir Hew had fallen beneath a chance blow from this fellow's golf-ball. But as my kinsman was still hors de combat, and incapable of further action, being unwitting, too, of the real cause of his disaster, Inchgrabbit and Strathtyrum, in their discretion as seconds, or belli judices, deemed it better that we should keep a still sough, and that Sir Hew should never be informed concerning the ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... fire-worshippers came with a very singular effect on the ear. When a boy, I have often passed through the fire myself on Midsummer eve, and such is still the custom. The higher the flame, the more daring the act is considered: hence there is a sort of emulation amongst the unwitting perpetrators of this Pagan rite. In many places cattle are driven through the fire; and this ceremony is firmly believed to have a powerful effect in preserving them from various harms. I need not ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... tops, keen as a rapier where it touched, carrying with it a fine dust of snow-powder. Gerald went out with the fine, blind face of a man who is in his state of fulfilment. Gudrun and he were in perfect static unity this morning, but unseeing and unwitting. They went out with a toboggan, leaving ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... heart thumped painfully, then the confusion of the unwitting eavesdropper compelled him to make his presence known. He did so with that fine discrimination and artful delicacy he summoned ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... was all unwitting; she intended to rally him sweetly. But seventeen is deathly serious at such junctures, and William was in a sensitive condition. He made no reply in words. Instead, he drew himself up (from the waist, that ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... unwarily ventures to take from the stall a mule which has not the advantage of his acquaintance. On this account they are rarely stolen. Even in the daytime they are often dangerous for strangers to approach, and the most of the ill-usage which men receive from their heels arises where unwitting people venture to treat them as they would horses. Mules are much less liable to panic-fear than the most of our domesticated animals, yet, when kept in the herded way, they occasionally become stampeded. Many a soldier of our Civil War, where mules played a large part in the campaigns, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... suddenly perturbed constituency. The realization flashed through every mind that if the women of Tinkletown stuck solidly together, there wasn't the ghost of a chance for the sex that had been in the saddle since the world began. An unwitting, or perhaps a designing, Providence had populated Tinkletown with at least twenty more ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... Even when her father had brought home his pretty bride and Esther, a shy, silent child of eleven, had welcomed her, she had known that the newcomer was the weaker spirit. The bride had known it too. She had never attempted to control Esther, leaving the child entirely to her father—a bit of unwitting wisdom which did much to smooth daily life at the Elms. If the doctor saw his wife's weakness of character it is probable that it did not interfere with his love for her. Why need she be strong while he was strong enough for two? But he had forgotten ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... there a more consummate love-making, with all the base intent of betrayal, than this cavalier seduction of Michael by the elderly, six- quart ship's steward. When Michael, not entirely unwitting of the snub of the man's lack of interest, stirred restlessly with a threat to depart, he had flung ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... never even should have come to trial," the senator said. "He was a popular, buddy-buddy sort of guy who managed to get himself involved as an unwitting figurehead. Bossard simply wasn't—and isn't—very bright. But he was a friendly, outgoing, warm sort of man who was able to get elected through the auspices of the local ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Charlotte; and now he was watching the Duke of Kent in his agony. On Stockmar's advice, a will was hastily prepared. The Duke's earthly possessions were of a negative character; but it was important that the guardianship of the unwitting child, whose fortunes were now so strangely changing, should be assured to the Duchess. The Duke was just able to understand the document, and to append his signature. Having inquired whether his writing was perfectly ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... all this domestic trouble and tragedy, the young wife's health has suffered—she scarcely enjoys one day of good health. Her mental condition is even worse. She submits to innuendo and insult under the impression that she is the unwitting cause of all the domestic wretchedness and often wishes she had never entered the marriage state. We must remember that these conditions wreck ideals and homes, and that they frequently render inefficient both ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... father," she said, very quietly, "to the full as well as it list you to tell me, how young, and weak, and all unwitting I be. But I trow that Christ deceiveth not His children because they be weak; and that if I can any words at all conceive, I can His. Saith He not, 'If ony man wole do His wille, he schall knowe of the ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... Must help herself, nor yet delay the aid. And she in truth, her will to satisfy, Deemed 'twas no time to wait till she was prayed. And next of shame renouncing every tye, With tongue as bold as eyes, petition made, And begged him, haply an unwitting foe, To sheathe the ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... a hideous little mind, he was telling himself—fearful in its latter day casting aside of all such small matters as taste and feeling. People stripped the garments from things in these days. He laughed inwardly at himself and his unwitting "these days." Senile severity mouthed just such phrases. Were they not his own days and the outcome of a past which had considered itself so much more decorous? Had not boldly questionable attitudes been held in those other days? ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
